Introducing Hinadi Mirza

Hinadi Mirza is currently a stay-at-home mom to an energetic toddler in the Midwest, and she spent most of her life in Virginia. She has a background in the medical field, but left her career behind to raise her son; an emotional and rewarding decision. She’s been writing poetry for over a decade, but she’s completely new to the world of publishing and hasn’t published a book yet. She’s held poetry close to her heart for a very long time, and she recently let go of her fears of releasing her work to the public by sharing some poems here and there.

Hinadi is currently polishing a full-length manuscript, Cloaked Truth, which she hopes to publish soon. It covers a broad range of topics, from love and empathy to pain and loss. She’s shared a few poems with family and friends, but most of those poems are not publicly available. Even though she just finished compiling her first book, she’s already started writing her next one! When it comes to the titles of her work, she likes to think that titles are a form of summarizing one of the emotions the poems evoke, but she also believes that it’s more about summarizing an emotion that describes her frame of mind and the level of growth she is at in her life. When she gets an idea about how she wants to express a thought or emotion, she usually starts with a few lines or a paragraph that she’ll come back to later to flesh out and complete. They don’t always turn into poems, but they’re nice to reflect back on, regardless.

For Hinadi, writing has always been enjoyable, even as a child, but her love affair with poetry really began in high school. The more she read and loved it, the more she realized she wanted to write as well. The last book she read was one of her all-time favorites, Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih. She particularly enjoys a good mystery book, but she’s open to reading any genre. She considers herself to be someone who’s always been a bit of an introvert— shy, not very talkative, nor adept at expressing herself verbally—and writing became the perfect outlet for her. It was a relief for her to be able to articulate her thoughts onto paper. She does most of her writing in her room and on her phone, but when she was younger, she used to write in diaries or notebooks. The most challenging part of writing for Hinadi is when she gets creative blocks, or if she’s not able to complete a poem to her liking and find the words she needs for it to really come together. She doesn’t really have a set schedule for writing, and there have been times when she’s gone long stretches without writing, though there are also weeks where inspiration hits and she can’t stop writing. Hinadi sometimes writes poems that can be difficult to revisit and re-read, but she’d rather get them onto paper and out of her system than let those emotions linger. In fact, those very same emotional poems are the ones she’s proudest of, her favorite of which is “Dreams to Dust”, and she wouldn’t trade that catharsis for anything. Even though a large part of writing poetry for Hinadi is processing emotions, because she enjoys it and feels a great passion for writing, it still keeps her energized and excited.

Reading poets like Pablo Neruda, E. E. Cummings, Mirza Ghalib, and Rumi inspired her to be honest and vulnerable in her writing. Her dream mentor would be Pablo Neruda, as he’s one of her favorite poets. When Hinadi is not writing, she enjoys spending time with her family and friends, painting, singing, playing board games, and traveling. Literary success for her means being able to write poems that she loves and is proud of. She notes that publishing and sharing poetry with others is another great level of success. If she had to offer one piece of advice for new writers, it would be to spill everything you have onto that piece of paper. She knows that writer’s block can be tough, especially if you’re someone who often writes after emotional gut punches, but a few random lines one night could eventually be completed another time and become one of your best poems.

You can find Hinadi on Instagram as @hinadila or email her at hwzmirza@gmail.com.